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sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Scientists have found that mice feel 36% less pain when a male researcher is in the room, versus a female researcher. The rodents are also less stressed out. The effect appears to be due to scent molecules that male mammals (including humans, dogs, and cats) have been emitting for eons. The finding could help explain why some labs have trouble replicating the results of others, and it could cause a reevaluation of decades of animal experiments: everything from the effectiveness of experimental drugs to the ability of monkeys to do math. Male odor could even influence human clinical trials."

No, your reading comprehension sucks and the summary is correct. From the end of the fourth paragraph in the fucking article (emphasis mine):

The rodents showed significantly fewer signs of pain (an average of a 36% lower score on the grimace scale) when a male researcher was in the room than when a female researcher—or no researcher at all—was there.

One could test for ACTH, another hormone that is often co-morbid with adrenaline as a stress reaction. That would seal the deal: animals are in fear, stressed, and are ready for men to do bad things to them. Women are comparatively harmless, as a result, in terms of invoking stress, were both adrenal and ACTH products present. Ought to be an easy test.

why are you confusing stress with showing pain?Anyway, this is a better quote:" The male aroma ramped up their stress levels, which deadened the hurt. “It’s really astounding that such a robust effect could have been missed for so many years,” Mogil says."

The summary is correct about reduced pain. It's backwards about stress level:

Further testing showed that the rodents exposed to male odors were actually feeling less pain, rather than simply hiding the pain they were in. The male aroma ramped up their stress levels, which deadened the hurt. “It’s really astounding that such a robust effect could have been missed for so many years,” Mogil says.

That's called modal learning and it's a real thing, but it's also likely your over-estimating your skill when drunk (most of us do). Modal learning associated with drink is also seen in bowlers and golfers.

If you learn to play while drunk you improve your skills while drunk but not while sober.In order to be good while sober you need to learn while sober.The fun part is that you learn lots of things while in different states.You learn to do something only while heavily caffeinated/drunk/high? Then it only comes to you easily while you are caffeinated, drunk or high...Caffeine and coding.Drink and darts.

I think frequency would be slightly more important here...you would want to maintain a suitable blood-alcohal level constantly, but then you could always spike it higher for those pesky 'dealing with the public' occasions.;-)

Citric acid works even better. I can go for two to three days without reapplying my citric acid solution and have done so for the past three years.

If you search online, you'll encounter all kinds of 'rub lemons under your armpits' and comparable tips. The more scientific approach is of course to just buy a kilo of crystallized citric acid for a few euro's and then mix it with water until you reach a pH-level slightly above 2.0 (buy some cheap indicator paper). Put it in a spray bottle and there you go.

Your comprehension of this article seems to be very different from mine.

The smell of males seems to make other mammals feel endangered, and in this state, they feel less pain. This is similar to how people under great stress (for other reasons than being in the presence of He-man) will ignore the pain from even serious injuries.

Now, if your goal is to make sure people around you are less bothered by pain, sure, share your smell with everyone. But if you would like to keep stress levels around you down, you should suppress your smell. It all depends on what your goal is.

As for those who 'cannot handle that information', you'd be surprised how often people confused those who cannot handle something, with those who are actually thinking over what they just learned, and considering the implications. There are times where inaction is worse than the the worst action. In the modern world, such situations are few and far between.

There's a huge bias towards using exclusively male mice in many types of research, and the issue of higher variance in female rodent behavior (due to estrous cycle issues, among others) is well known (see eg: pdf [genderinscience.org]).

There are also related problems more generally with stress and over-training in neuroscience. Experienced investigators are able to produce a much less stressful working environment for animals, so they tend to get different results from neophyte investigators even when following the same protocol

What does a percent of lessened pain feel like? I can't even tell whether my throat hurts half as bad as it did yesterday or a fourth as bad, and that's from a first person perspective, the only perspective from which you actually have access to pain sensations.

You're not quantifying your reactions to pain. If someone kept track of how often you said "Ouch, my throat" or grimmaced while swallowing, you could probably get an idea. It would be a proxy measure at best, maybe you were just used to it and it hurt the same amount. But one needs to quantify something in order to know if it's working.

Animal studies are usually pretty messy even if you're not measuring behavior. Everyone who works with animals knows this. It's also more expensive. If you're testin

Pain scales [wikipedia.org] in a lab setting are fairly common and rigorous. They mostly use a physical response that can correlated to pain using a complex apparatus. Of course, it is all extremely finicky which is why it took so long for this influencing factor to be detected.

We actually have a lot of data that confirms that humans don't feel pain while they are unconscious: the reaction you get from cutting them with a scalpel. If you cut someone who is conscious, their stress level increases, they pull away from the source of pain, they report the sensation of being in pain, and they react in various other manners. When you cut someone who is unconscious, their stress level does not increase (heart rate etc.), they don't pull away from the source of pain, they don't report pai

When someone is cut who is merely paralyzed, yes, stress levels can increase, and this is then taken by the anaesthesiologist as a sign of consciousness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]

Are you telling me you never felt real pain while dreaming? My first experience was when I was 4-5 years old, and I dreamed that I kept falling into a river of tomato soup. When I fell in, there was an intense stabbing pain in my gut. Eventually I woke up to having diarrhea. I had a stomach bug for a couple of days that I felt the symptoms of when I was unconscious. Another dream much later in life, someone stabbed me in my foot. Apparently, I had kicked the post on my bed (as per my wife) and had a nice br

First, yes, I have never felt pain while dreaming. Second, I think when you're dreaming you're neither conscious nor unconscious, but exhibit aspects of both. Dreaming is different from being wide awake, but it's also different from being under anaesthesia. Meditative states and altered states of consciousness brought about by hallucinogens or psychosis are similarly difficult to place firmly in either category. Maybe it would help to see dreaming as "being in a certain mental state while you are asleep" th

All of you socialist leaning liberals take note, your average American sees socialized medicine as "Everybody stuck with an Army or VA Doctor". I'm actually surprised that the congress-criters that voted for Obamacare weren't tarred and feathered after they were thrown out of office.

I suspect that the animals *expect* to be tortured when males are around, so they steel themselves against it and thus feel pain less. However, when females are administering the pain, it is unexpected, and thus more intense.

I could easily believe that male hormones cause nearby animals to be more prepared to defend themselves and thus pain relief follows as an aid to flight or fight enhancements in the animal.
This also demonstrates why variables should never exist in any scientific experiment and just how subtle a variable may be. The financial losses from decades of spoiled research could be considerable.

It also makes you want to question other effects that would appear to trivial to even mention: like whether the room has fluorescent or incandescent lighting. Is there a lot of vibration from being near a road. What colour are the walls painted and the smell of the cleaning materials used by the janitors.

And I thought it was only the social sciences who had so many variables that they simply ignored 99.99% of them: and couldn't even identify the rest.

Here is another paper where the researches used a patch clamp to interface the spinal cord. (A patch clamp is a very low noise/high gain amplifier that can measure single cell ion channels, etc -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org])

This may be affecting experiments, but if you're designing your experiments correctly, it won't change your results. The "male in the room" effect should affect all animals the same.

You have a control set and a variable set of mice. The animal handlers should be the same for both, and they shouldn't know if at all possible which is which. Males on the staff will stress out the mice, okay, but they'll stress out both control and variable mice the same. Having a female undergrad handle the control cages and a male undergrad handle the variable mice you're using to try to prove your drug makes them hurt less is going to skew your results independent of gender scents.

No, if I try to reproduce your study, but your lab had a male animal handler and mine didn't, I may get different results."Presence of male human" was not previously thought to be something that had to be controlled for.

Not in the cases where you measure LEVELS of sensitivity to pain in some way.Which basically includes every endurance or stress test.

They are "zeroed out" to a higher level.

Now your mice endure longer or don't start reacting as soon as they should have. So all your results are off by a third.On top of that, someone tries to repeat your experiment - and their mice react differently.There goes the peer review.

And that's just the pain. What else is influenced by inducing more stress?

Rats react to women the same as if their was no observer?Maybe we should she if women can observe things without changing states!

This would explain a lot of male confusion when women say two diametrically opposed things in the same sentence... They can just observe more quantum states than we can and can't understand why we cannot.:)

It's even more wonderfully complex than that. TFA says that a T-shirt worn by a female placed next to the rats produced no change, while a T-shirt worn by a male reduced the levels of pain. But placing both T-shirts together cancelled out the effect of the male T-shirt. So the preservation of quantum state by a female observer also extends to a male observer if a female is present. I guess this explains why her POV always prevails in a relationship.

These days, her opinion prevails mainly because of the implied threat of her leaving and taking all his life's earning with her, hangs over his head. We have the ivy league left-wing indoctrinated feminist judges to thank for that (both male and female). For Great (Social) Justice.

What's the baseline stress level? It would answer the question: do men cause 33% more stress or do women aleviate 33% stress? And I call bullshit on it anyway because I can tell you who stresses me out the most in order: my mom, my grandma, my sisters and my wife.

"everything from the effectiveness of experimental drugs to the ability of monkeys to do math"
Aha, so next time you're doing poorly on a math exam, tell the teacher that you need all the males to leave.

Bzzt. Oh, so sorry. The correct response was "Wow, I was a total dumbass for not reading the article. My idiotic knee-jerk rejection of this study based on the first stupid thought to cross my mind was completely wrong. I apologize for being a know-nothing smart-ass and promise not to do it again." Better luck next time!

The results were quite simple. No odor, or just female odor = 1 result. Male odor = another result.

Simple logic would then equate female odor = no effect (simply because the female odor had the same effect as no odor at all).So therefore, the male odor was causing a change in the results of the experiment.

The most interesting thing in the experiment was that male odor + female odor cancelled out the male odor effect.

Apparently (as stated in TFA), UNACCOMPANIED male odor caused the mice to not be willing to show pain, but a strange male in company with a strange female didn't cause the mice to go all macho all of a sudden.

So, I wonder if male mice with female mice will show different effects than male mice alone?

Govt isn't funded by taxes, in the same way that banks aren't funded by deposits. Banks' loans (created out of nothing) are their assets. So the Fed expands its balance sheet by creating an asset, which funds the government, and keeps the asset on its books forever. Zero-cost govt funding. Taxes aren't necessary, a relic of a feudal era.

"Further testing showed that the rodents exposed to male odors were actually feeling less pain, rather than simply hiding the pain they were in. The male aroma ramped up their stress levels, which deadened the hurt. “It’s really astounding that such a robust effect could have been missed for so many years,” Mogil says."

That's not directly contradicting what he said though: unless researchers are directly patch-clamping the pain nerves in the mouse feet while doing this and showing there are fewer pain signals from the same injury, one can't say for sure they're feeling less pain as opposed to simply hiding it. The stress might be working at the paw, or it might be working in the brain.

So, that sounds impressive, but at most you patch clamps neurons, not nerves, and the relationship between activity nociceptive neurons and perceived pain is complex. Even were you able to record the activity of all nociceptive sensory neurons responding to the stimulus, you could not from that predict how the pain would be experienced in the brain, where the experiencing part is actually happening. (Heck, right now I'm working with sea slugs, that don't have brains, but instead just a number of ganglia, an

Further testing showed that the rodents exposed to male odors were actually feeling less pain, rather than simply hiding the pain they were in.

The article then continues to support your reason for less pain response. That the potential presence of a lone male predator is a threat and it is not safe spending excess time responding to minor injuries.Also, the line right after the above quote indicates that the summary has it backward (as surprise to no one) about the part of test-rats getting stressed.

The male aroma ramped up their stress levels, which deadened the hurt.

This also indicates that lions figured out how to cheat the system.Male: "Every one of those tasty herbivores gets so flighty when I get close."Femal

The more likely explanation (at least I think so anyway) is that exclusively male hormones with no female hormones present, coupled with the fact that nearly all mammals conserve these olfactory signals, means that the same olfactory signals in a "Strongly competitive" mouse colony (reproductively competitive that is) are being expressed by the preponderantly male research scientists, which increases stress hormone levels in the mice, which chemically inhibits pain receptivity.